Roy Cohn, a ruthless, ambitious, and unethical attorney, was the right-hand man of the infamous Sen. Joseph McCarthy. He was also a closeted gay Jew who used his power against other Jews and gays.
Born in New York in 1927, Cohn graduated from Columbia Law School at 20, passed the bar at 21, and became the youngest assistant U.S. attorney. The case that launched his career was the 1951 trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused of leaking atomic secrets to the Soviets. Cohn was one of four attorneys who successfully prosecuted them for treason, but it was he alone who convinced the judge, an old family friend, to impose the death penalty.
In January 1953, McCarthy chose Cohn over Robert Kennedy as chief counsel to the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations. For the next 18 months, Cohn's vicious and single-minded ferreting out of suspected Communists and homosexuals in the government made his name a household word.
Cohn brought to the committee his good friend, G. David Schine, as an unpaid "consultant." The young man's only qualification seems to have been that he had written an eight-page booklet called "Definition of Communism," which he placed in the hotels his family owned.
When Schine was drafted and came close to being sent to Korea, Cohn relentlessly attempted to get him an official assignment on the committee. Unable to pull the necessary strings, Cohn resorted to intimidating the Secretary of the Army, Robert Stevens. Charges and countercharges of bribery flew. The Army accused Cohn of threatening to investigate their ranks unless Private Schine got a cushy assignment. Cohn maintained that the Army was holding Schine "hostage" until Cohn agreed to ignore its infiltration by Communists. The televised Army-McCarthy hearings, initiated by the Senate to explore the allegations, began in April 1954 and were viewed by an estimated 20 million people.
Cohn's unwavering devotion to Schine suggested that they were lovers, though Cohn was probably just infatuated with the handsome young man. During the hearings, several members of the Senate baited Cohn, pressuring him about his "special interest" in Schine.
At one low point, Joseph Welch, the Army's attorney, asked McCarthy about a doctored photo of Secretary Stevens smiling at Schine:
Welch: Did you think this [photo] came from a pixie? ...
McCarthy: Will the counsel for my benefit define - I think he might be an expert on that - what a pixie is?
Welch: Yes, I should say, Senator, that a pixie is a close relative of a fairy. Shall I proceed, sir? Have I enlightened you?
The room erupted in laughter, to Cohn's humiliation. Cohn's biographer calls the photo McCarthy and Cohn's "smoking gun," the proof of their mendacity. By December 1954, Cohn had resigned and McCarthy was censured by the Senate. The senator died two years later of alcoholism. Throughout his life, Cohn called McCarthy "the greatest man I ever worked for."
Over the next 30 years, Cohn built a high-powered law career in New York. Between 1963 and 1971, however, he was indicted three times for crimes such as perjury and witness tampering. Cohn was acquitted in each case, but in the 1980s, further allegations of unethical conduct finally led to disbarment, just weeks before he died of AIDS on August 2, 1986.
Though he himself had been the target of homophobia, to his dying day Cohn refused to acknowledge being gay or that he had AIDS, claiming he was suffering from liver cancer. One of Cohn's final campaigns was lobbying against New York City's gay rights ordinance.
Poster Comment:
Roy Cohn his entire life had these creepy, sunken, Frankenstein sanpaku eyes. You can just look at him and tell something is very wrong with him.